“Heaven didn’t beckon. Heaven
kicked.”[1]—What
Helen Wolff (born July 27, 1906 in Vranjska-Banja, Serbia; died March 29, 1994 in Hanover, NH) considered as a motto for the successful publishing career she and
her husband pursued in the United States, having fled Europe in 1941, applied
not only to their entrepreneurial beginnings but also to their ends. They would
not have founded Pantheon Books Inc. in 1942 if they as immigrants had not been
forced to do so for a living, and they would not have left Pantheon Books Inc.
in 1960 if they as immigrants had not been driven out by a board of directors
who could not understand the cultural preconditions for the bestsellers they
had created in the second half of the 1950s. Both steps, the entrepreneurial
retreat as much as the entrepreneurial initiative, turned out to be good for
them and good for the quality trade book market in the United States. Kurt (born March 3, 1887 in Bonn, Germany; died October 21, 1963 in Ludwigsburg, Germany) and
Helen Wolff continued to publish a mainly apolitical list at Harcourt, Brace
under the imprint “A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book.” Pantheon was bought by Random
House and made a mark for itself with a distinguished social-political program.
Today, the names of Helen and Kurt Wolff are still well known in publishing and
book-loving circles in the U.S. and in Europe for their ability to render
seemingly unprofitable books profitable, and for having brought European
literature in first-rate translations to the American reader.[2] Even
though their entrepreneurial contribution to the publishing market in the
United States, measured in economic numbers, was small, they expanded and
enriched it with books that previously would not have had access to it. Thereby
they established themselves as role models in the business and have been added
to the distinguished line of characters that came to represent “the independent
age of the great twentieth-century publishers,” next to the founders of much
bigger and more influential publishing companies like Random House, Alfred A.
Knopf, or The Viking Press.[3]

When Kurt and Helen Wolff
arrived in New York in March 1941, it seemed to some who had helped them with
affidavits and advice that Kurt, at the age of almost fifty-five, had the past,
and his wife Helen, more than twenty years younger, had the future—leaving a
big question mark as to how to finance their living in the present. The
cultural capital that both of them carried across the Atlantic would not be
transformed into a financial asset easily. Kurt Wolff, born on March 3, 1887,
in the German town of Bonn to its musical director Leonhard Wolff (a friend of
Brahms) and the daughter of an engineer and railway entrepreneur of Jewish
origin, was deeply rooted in the German tradition of music and literature.
Having developed a passionate interest in the modern, expressionist poetry and
literature that emerged in the years before World War I, he invested his
inherited fortune as a very young man in publishing activities.[4] His
publishing house Kurt Wolff Verlag in
Leipzig, the city of books, had a magnetic attraction to the young generation
of poets who dreamed in those years that mankind could be renewed by a
spiritual and intellectual revolution. Assembling almost all the interesting
authors of the time, Franz Kafka being its most important discovery, the Kurt Wolff Verlag also became famous for
introducing new methods of production and marketing and for combining good
literature with an ambitious and sophisticated design. It was the first to
publish unknown avant-garde poets in inexpensive but still finely produced
editions which imitated the mass production series of publishing houses like
Ullstein and were aimed at a broad readership.[5] It
also was the first to spread the image of a “new” and “young” generation of
literature in large-scale and inventive advertising in the daily media and on
posters, using all sorts of “hokums” like rebinding and selling the unsold
copies of a first edition as a second edition, or labeling as “new” books and
authors that had been lingering on the market for quite a while.[6]

However, in the aftermath of
World War I, Kurt Wolff became more and more alienated from the expressionist and
post-expressionist movement that the name of his house stood for. The outcome
of the revolution, the politicization and polarization of the literary scene,
and above all the hyperinflation generally had devastating effects on the
relationship between publishers and authors.[7] Kurt
Wolff’s famous combination of being both a shrewd businessman and a generous
patron of the arts, formerly so attractive, now made him suspicious in the eyes
of his craving and embittered authors. Since having moved his business to
Munich in 1919, he slowly lost his interest in contemporary German literature.
Instead he turned to art and art history and to bibliophile activities that
could be seen as apolitical and matched the taste and the inclinations of the high
society in which he and his first wife Elisabeth liked to move. Elisabeth belonged
to the wealthy, quasi-aristocratic family Merck in Darmstadt that owned the
pharmaceutical company Merck. She supported Kurt Wolff with money, advice, and
connections as long as their marriage lasted. In 1924 he cofounded the
international publishing house Pantheon
Casa Editrice in Florence, an attempt to bring expensively produced art
books and art history books in several languages to European countries and the
United States. But with growing nationalism and a declining world economy the
elitist approach of both the Kurt Wolff
Verlag and the Pantheon Casa Editrice
was impossible to sustain. While the inventory grew, the cash flow diminished,
and the lack of capital increasingly trapped Kurt Wolff in inactivity. Faint
hopes that an American investor might help were shattered when the Great
Depression hit. By mid-1930 Kurt Wolff was so exhausted and burned
out—financially, privately, and professionally—that he withdrew from all his
activities. His first marriage ended the same year. While planning to
eventually return to professional life by finding employment in the cultural
field, he decided to reinvent himself during an extensive vacation—a vacation
which, due to the Nazi rise to power in 1933 and Kurt Wolff’s unequivocal
refusal to compromise with the regime, was to last until his arrival in the
United States and the founding of Pantheon Books.

His companion in these years of
crisis was a young secretary and translator who had begun to work for the Kurt Wolff Verlag in 1928, Helene Mosel.
Helene had been born on July 27, 1906, in Vranjska Banja, a small Serbian
village, to a German-Austrian family which, like the Wolffs, originated in the
educated and entrepreneurial upper classes, but had been in constant decline
for two generations. Helene’s father, an adventurer more than a businessman,
had created and lost short-term wealth through trades and trafficking in the
disintegrating Ottoman Empire, and had left his wife and his four children
impoverished in 1923. Helene spent her childhood years in Üsküb (today Skopje,
the capital of the Macedonian Republic), in Vienna, in Berlin, and in several
places in Bavaria. Even though she had to quit school to earn money as a nanny
and a governess, she was able, together with her weak but determined mother, to
hold the family together and allow herself and her siblings to succeed in the
German upper bourgeois society. Her obvious gifts and talents—she had taught herself
perfect English and French and had acquired a stunning literary knowledge by
the age of fifteen—won her and her relatives the support of a network of
industrial families in Frankfurt in the vicinity of IG Farben. After she had
spent four years in one of these families, another one of her patrons arranged
with Kurt Wolff for her to get a chance to “make herself indispensable”[8] at
his publishing house, during a time when its employees had been dismissed in
vast numbers. Of the approximately one hundred employees and freelancers in
1923, only a handful were left by 1927.[9]

While Kurt Wolff was in the
process of dissolving his businesses, Helene worked intermittently as his
private secretary, as translator and editor for his former partner John Holroyd
Reece in Paris, and even briefly for a branch of the League of Nations.
Beginning in April 1931, Kurt and Helene lived together permanently. Helene tried
out a career as a writer of theater plays and stories, which seemed very
promising to Kurt Wolff and their literary friends. But the continuous economic
and political decline prevented the various publishing houses and theaters that
had shown interest in her works to actually publish or show any of them. During
this period, they retreated to pleasant, inexpensive places in the south of
France and watched in fearful anticipation and disgust as Germany was
increasingly plagued by the Depression and political extremism. Kurt Wolff
managed to transfer most of his money out of Germany to banks in Switzerland
and England—a prescient act which after 1933 ensured their existence in exile
and even helped to enable the founding of Pantheon Books. At the turn of the
year 1932/33, it looked like he had managed to secure his future in a
respectable, employed position in Germany. But since Kurt was not a party
member, the offer to work for the Cultural Policy Department of the Foreign
Ministry in Berlin was immediately withdrawn when Hitler took power. So the
couple decided on February 25 or 26—before the Reichstag fire—to leave Germany
again, convinced that the new government meant a “lapse into barbarism,” as
Helene wrote to her brother, and that “since the Nazis took power there
obviously no longer is room to live for a halfway decent person.”[10]

What had been voluntary travel
and vacation time before 1933, renting inexpensive houses in the south and
sharing them with paying guests, turned into weeks and months, then long and
bitter years of exile in Paris, London—where they married on March 27,
1933—Montagnola, St. Tropez and Nice—where their son Christian was born in
1934—and Tuscany, where they bought an estate, searching for a self-sufficient
way of life. In the summer of 1938, when Italy became a dangerous place for
German emigrants, they returned to France and ended up in Paris, desperately
looking for employment. Helen found work as a secretary, whereas all of Kurt’s
efforts to build a professional life were in vain. After the war broke out,
both of them wrote propaganda pamphlets and brochures for the French Information
Ministry. They saw this as a pledge to France and a final, unequivocal
statement against Germany, putting them in acute danger once the German army
invaded France. Until this point, one of the reasons the Wolffs had never been
active among the politically motivated and émigré communities was that they did
not consider themselves obvious targets for National Socialist persecution, but
felt relatively safe as German expatriates. Helen was an “Aryan” under the
Nuremberg Laws, and even Kurt’s Jewish origins were so diluted that his sister
managed to live through the Third Reich without being troubled. As most of
their relatives, including Kurt’s two children, had stayed in Germany, they
went to great lengths not to attract the authorities’ attention. Only the outbreak
of the war made them show clearly which side they were on.

The Wolff’s first choice would
have been to become French citizens. Under the Vichy Regime, however, staying
in France was not an option. After having been interned in camps as enemy aliens
they mobilized all their resources to leave France and emigrate to the United
States. With the affidavits from a friend and a helpful stranger in New York,
their good connections with French politicians and the support of Varian Fry,
an American journalist who ran a refugee network in Vichy France, they managed
to obtain all the necessary papers. They left Marseilles for Lisbon on February
9, 1941, found a passage to New York in mid-March and arrived there on March
30, a “beautiful, sunny day.”[11]

Like many of the literary,
intellectual and political emigrants that arrived in the United States after
France had fallen, Kurt and Helen Wolff found it much harder to leave Europe
than to leave Germany. In their first letters they repeatedly noted that
Americans seemed to them strong, dynamic, and pragmatic but lacking in cultural
education and historical consciousness. Notions and apprehensions like these usually
made it difficult for new immigrants to succeed as entrepreneurs with cultural
products in surroundings culturally alien to them.[12] On
the other hand, after more than ten years of constant disappointment and
harassment, the Wolffs were exceptionally willing to learn, to appreciate and
to take even the smallest chance to earn their living in a free society. Apart
from a small sum, which they managed to pry loose from an English bank and
which would be able to sustain them for a couple of months, they had been left
more or less destitute by their flight from Europe. Helen, who mastered the
English language even better than French and Italian, would have had no
difficulties in finding a job as a secretary. For Kurt, however, the
possibility of finding an employed position was almost ruled out by his age,
his deficient English, and the fact that he had been seemingly idle for so many
years. As one of their American supporters had already stated in 1938: “He
speaks of his own extraordinary well-being, and his anxiety to work;
nevertheless, it still remains true that for the past twenty years [sic!] Wolff
has done no work, and that is, from the American point of view, somewhat
immoral.”[13]
Nevertheless, nobody kept them from setting up a business on their own and
trying—against all odds—to find a market for what they believed they could do
best: making books.

Even though war was imminent in
1941, a range of factors made the time not altogether unfavorable for starting
a small, intellectually ambitious but financially modest new publishing house.
The U.S. economy had just recovered from a recession, boosted by government
spending and rearmament. Roosevelt had finally managed to overcome the
isolationist attitude of the public, and there was a growing public interest in
European culture, especially when the information seemed bipartisan, apolitical,
and beyond any suspicion of fostering socialist or communist ideas.
Furthermore, the immigrants that had recently arrived and settled in New York
and on the West Coast had, though small in number, brought about a massive
cultural transfer, bringing with them new ideas, academic knowledge,
intellectual concepts, artistic creativity, and a general curiosity which
created a market for its own cultural objects. By incorporating American
intellectuals and artists, these networks provided not only an audience for
good books but also access to authors, designers, editors, translators,
sponsors, and reviewers.[14]

During their first months in
New York, the Wolffs socialized incessantly, attending classical concerts and
public readings, inviting people for dinner if their guests were indigent or
for a drink if they were not, and mingling with emigrants and Americans alike
in order to gather the knowledge and the contacts to pursue cultural endeavors.
Some of the established publishers in New York, especially Alfred and Blanche
Knopf of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, helped them with generous advice and information.
The quality book market in those days was easy to survey: a good two dozen
relatively small firms in the hands of men who “regarded the business as a
gentleman’s profession.”[15] They
shared the motivation that had also driven Kurt Wolff, namely to do business with
what they loved most: books, ideas and art. Their readiness to cooperate with
competitors and help newcomers was based on the industry’s “sense of uniqueness,”[16] i.e.
the self-imagination that its product was special, could not be accomplished by
commercial deliberations alone, and eluded the ordinary consumer market.[17] The
publishing business as a gentlemen’s club, in part including their wives, was
not yet challenged by the paperback and education industry revolution, which
loomed on the horizon, and by shareholders wanting a maximum return on
investments. While the publishers of course did not want to go into red ink,
the absence of financial interest mitigated the competition and created images
of a “small, chummy world (...), when W.H. Auden, Ralph Ellison, Edmund Wilson,
or Vladimir Nabokov dropped off a manuscript or just dropped by for a chat or a
drink.”[18] The
downsides of this industry—the dangers of undercapitalization and
overproduction, the heavy workloads and high amount of responsibility placed on
individuals—were only too well known to Kurt Wolff from his own experiences in
the 1920s.

As the publishing industry
traditionally resisted consumer research, relying exclusively on the editors’
judgment, it was left to the Wolffs to form their own impression of the market.
They began with the German and French books that had helped them through the
difficult times in France and could be considered “classics.” Kurt Wolff spent
many weeks in the New York Public Library to find out which of their favorites
had not yet been translated. Of course most of the key works of European
literature could be found in the United States. Especially the younger and
smaller houses that had been founded since the turn of the century included
European titles in their lists: The Viking Press held some of the former authors
of the Kurt Wolff Verlag such as
Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth, Arnold Zweig, and books that the Wolffs had attached
themselves to in France by Jules Romain, Roger Martin du Gard, and others.
Alfred A. Knopf was the publisher of Thomas Mann, W.W. Norton&Company had
the poetry of Rilke, Random House had Proust, and the newcomer Frederick Ungar,
a refugee like the Wolffs, had just started a company to publish new books and
new editions of out-of-print books of European philosophy. Furthermore, there
were the university presses to publish the more scholarly books which were
unlikely to succeed on the commercial market. So the gap in the market for
European literature was narrow. Nevertheless, by the end of September 1941, the
Wolffs were convinced that “in cultural matters there is indeed still more
demand than supply, a situation that seems quite incredible.”[19]

At Christmas 1941, two weeks
after the U.S. entered the war, the Wolffs took the first step toward financing
a publishing enterprise. An old friend of Kurt Wolff’s from his days in Munich
and Florence, Baron Curt von Faber du Faur, a wealthy collector of rare books
and a specialist in Baroque literature who later became professor and curator
at Yale University, drew up a letter together with his stepson Kyrill Schabert
saying that they would give $7,500 if Kurt Wolff succeeded in finding an equal
sum from other sources. One month later Wolff had arranged the second half of
the funding: Robert Weinberg, a New York architect who had already given the
Wolffs an affidavit without even knowing them, George Merck, an American
relative of Kurt’s ex-wife and president of the pharmaceutical firm Merck &
Co., and Gerard Neisser, a friend of Helen’s brother, were willing to buy
shares of the company once it was registered in February 1942. Apart from
Weinberg, they all had German origins and were immigrants in the first, second,
or third generation.

With the minimal capital of
$15,000, the firm started off as a tiny business in the living room, dining
room, and bedroom of the Wolffs’ apartment on Washington Square. It had to
serve as an office, shipping room, and makeshift reception space at the same
time. This saved rent, though it put a constant strain on family and
professional life. Kurt Wolff had to go without a salary until profits were
generated. He wrote to Faber du Faur: “Let me state this clearly once again: If
I succeed in building the publishing house to the full (material and literary)
satisfaction of everybody involved, to earn a modest subsistence minimum for
myself and my family and of course a decent return for the shareholders, then I
will be happy and content—especially happy to have found a field of work so
agreeable to me. I have no intent of any personal self-enrichment.”[20] To
understand this attitude, one has to consider the Wolffs’ experience during
their years of exile in Europe: They had shown, by their commitment to the ill-fated
French cause, that they were prepared to stand, even to die for their
convictions. Now safe and able to occupy themselves with books again, it was
more than ever out of the question for them to compromise their moral and
aesthetic values. They were determined not to “cheat:” not the reader, not the
authors, not themselves or anybody else. In later years Kurt Wolff recalled:

When
my wife and I ventured into publishing again in 1942 in New York, we were asked
about our publishing program. We did not have one, as the intention to publish
good books can hardly be called a program. But I answered without a moment’s
reflection: I only want to publish books which I do not have to feel ashamed
about on my deathbed. Books by dead authors in whom we believe. Books by living
authors whom we do not need to lie to. All my life two elements have seemed to
me the worst and basically inevitable burden of being a publisher: Lying to
authors and feigning knowledge one does not have, a sadly insincere attitude.
(...) We might err, that is inevitable, but the unconditional conviction, the
absolute belief in the authentic word and worth of what you choose should
always be the premise for each and every book.”[21]

This morally charged
determination had not motivated him in the times of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, and it also differed from the convictions of
most other American publishers who, even if they had a strong notion of
quality, took their profession more lightheartedly, with fewer ethical
concerns.

However, the Wolffs’ judgment
on what books were “good” and “authentic” was not only intrinsic, based on
their values and their past experiences. It also met the intellectual and
spiritual fashions and trends of the day. Crossword puzzles, cookbooks, light
fiction, crime and mystery stories, ephemeral popular fact books: these all
were out of the question. Political literature, books which transported the
memories or experiences of one specific group, or books which were concerned
with facts instead of with the seemingly eternal truth, which were “topical” as
opposed to “timely,” were also excluded. The Wolffs’ “editorial concept,” if
not program, was “to help spread knowledge and understanding of the essential
questions of human life and culture.”[22] This
“universalist” approach, claiming to represent not only one faction but
humanity as a whole, putting art and literature in the realm of spiritual,
moral and aesthetic experiences and excluding the realm of political and social
experiences, was in line with the transcendentalist tendencies of a major part
of the educated American reading public at that time. It helped rid Pantheon
Books of the taint of a “publisher in exile” irrelevant or perhaps even
dangerous to American concerns. The questionability of this approach becomes
apparent when one looks at some editorial choices made by the Wolffs such as
the books that addressed the crimes and the victims of National Socialism, for
example. They published testimonies of the moral and religious resistance
against Hitler, like Theodor Haecker’s Journal
in the Night (1950) or the collection of farewell letters Dying We Live (1956), with an
introduction by Reinhold Niebuhr.[23] But
voices from the political, left-wing resistance and Jewish voices were
excluded. The Wolffs declined to publish Eugen Kogon’s The SS-State – The System of the German Concentration Camps (1946)
and all French accounts of the Holocaust experience as a matter of “principle.”[24] Only
in the 1960s this attitude changed, and the Holocaust experience became of
“universal” interest for the Wolffs as well as for the American book market.

On sufficiently large common
ground with mainstream American culture, Pantheon was able to look for the
small niches and gaps in the market that it could fill. The Wolffs recognized
that there was a surprising absence of literary anthologies; they recognized a
demand for European classics that cast a new light on the “crisis of the times”
from a quasi-superior, quasi-prophetic viewpoint; they recognized a need for
bibliophile books and for contemporary but not abstract art prints; they
recognized—this had to be credited to Helen especially—the marketability of
children’s books, juvenile books and fairy tales also for grown-ups; and they
recognized—again to Helen’s credit—that there existed a larger and broader-minded
audience for mystical and Catholic literature than the specialized readership
of the explicitly Catholic and conservative publishing houses Regnery or Devin
Adair.

Notwithstanding, the works of
fellow German or Austrian emigrants were important projects, albeit not in the
majority. Almost every book the Wolffs published had a European background. The
fact that Pantheon Books today enjoys the reputation of having started off as a
home for first-rate European literature must be attributed, to a considerable
extent, to the Wolffs’ French partner Jacques Schiffrin during the years 1943
to 1950. He acquired many titles of lasting literary importance from the French
underground, books by André Gide, Albert Camus, Louis Aragon and others.

Though it sought compatibility
with American expectations, Pantheon Books was nevertheless conceived as a
non-American business through and through: Helen described her “crazy office”
as a “Babel of languages,”[25] she
herself being “grotesque as it may sound, (...) the only person in the
editorial and production department who knows some English.”[26] The
Wolffs spoke French with Schiffrin, a Jewish refugee who had arrived
traumatized from Europe, German with their part-time employee Wolfgang
Sauerländer, who like themselves had left Germany for ethical reasons and
brought a flair of Bavarian “Gemütlichkeit” with him, English with the salesmen
and production people, and a mix of English, German, French and Italian with
each other and their son. The European authors and intellectuals who came to
their apartment found their “one-room life incl. publishing charming and nice,”[27]
whereas American professionals were startled and asked for the official office
address. Equally unusual in American publishing was the absoluteness of their
publishing credo—“in the beginning was the word and not the number”[28]—always
giving priority to communication over financial calculations. The Wolffs relied
heavily on good, faithful, and truthful communication and contact. Money and
business to them were not values in and of themselves, but expressions of the
quality of human relationships. They always refused to formulate conflicts as
money conflicts or conflicts of interest, but interpreted them as moral
conflicts in terms of honesty, reliability, consideration, and respect.

And serious conflicts there
were. From the very beginning, the Wolffs had to cope with the fact that the working
capital of Pantheon Books was sorely inadequate for their operations. Seeing
that the best results they could hope for seemed both financially limited and
outweighed by considerable risks, the shareholders showed no interest in
investing more than the absolute minimum. After 1946, the firm drew in more
capital from the outside by giving out shares, but on a very modest scale and
bringing only temporary relief. While Pantheon Books built an excellent
reputation for itself and produced respectable profits in the years up until
1948, the lack of capital prevented growth and placed a heavy burden on the
Wolffs and Schiffrin. Helen received a monthly salary of $400 and Kurt $500,[29] and
if it had not been for the generous presents and frequent invitations from
their wealthy friends, their material shortcomings would have been difficult to
bear. After two years of operating in their one-room apartment, Kurt Wolff managed
to rent an extra room in the basement of the building. Only in 1949 could Pantheon
move into an appropriate office on Sixth Avenue, and the Wolffs got a new
apartment that actually had a bedroom for them.

The way that Pantheon
functioned in these years, the Wolffs and their publishing projects would have
been better off under the head of a nonprofit organization than as a
shareholders’ business. When the firm had just entered its second year of
existence, in the spring of 1943, an opportunity arose for Kurt and Helen to
continue publishing under the aegis of a wealthy and ambitious foundation, without
ever having to worry about money again. Mary Mellon, wife of the philanthropist
Paul Mellon, offered Kurt Wolff a job running the Bollingen Series, a series of books on art, art history,
archeology, anthropology, psychology, and mysticism centered around the Collected Works of C.G. Jung and indeed
congenial to the Wolffs’ publishing ambit.[30] Kurt
Wolff, having at that time reached the age of 56, found the offer especially
attractive “as this would have meant for [him] peace and retirement and pension
from the age of 65.”[31] In
the end, however, he declined the offer. Instead, an arrangement was made
whereby Pantheon would supervise the manufacturing and undertake the
distribution and sale of the Bollingen
books, for a fixed remuneration and an additional ten percent share in the
sales. This extremely favorable arrangement sustained Pantheon through the
years.

That Pantheon should be continued
as a firm and not eventually be merged into the Bollingen setting was mainly in the personal interest of one man:
Kyrill Schabert, stepson of Curt von Faber du Faur and one of the main
shareholders. Roughly Helen’s age, he had not yet embarked on a career of his
own, and working in the publishing field enabled him to make use of his know-how
in finance and marketing as well as to meet his social and cultural ambitions.
Kurt and Helen perceived him as a charming man with a “veneer of sophistication,”
though “no real literary knowledge,”[32] and
at the outset nothing seemed to stand in the way of a good cooperation, even a
friendship. As Schabert was the only American citizen among them (whereas Kurt
Wolff was classified as an enemy alien after the U.S. was drawn into the war),
it seemed wise to install Schabert as formal president. Kurt was executive vice
president, Helen and later Schiffrin vice presidents. During the first years,
Schabert accepted these positions as a formality and conformed to the firm
being “headed up” by Kurt Wolff, as it was written in Faber du Faur’s letter of
intent in 1941.[33]
And while Schabert was mostly absent in 1942, from 1943 onwards he got involved
as salesman, accountant, and treasurer, receiving the same minimal salary as
Helen and Schiffrin. The Wolffs could not object and kept their complaints that
the firm needed “basically a proficient business person to organize the
whole thing better”[34] to
themselves. When fellow émigré Salman Schocken in 1944 expressed an interest in
participating in Pantheon and increasing its capital, and Schabert again was
“excitedly against it,” the “only reason” Kurt Wolff “could think of [was] that
he was afraid about his position and future in a completely different set up.”[35]
Schocken then founded his own publishing house in the United States in 1945,
Schocken Books, and from the frequency and authority of Kurt Wolff’s counseling
services in their letters, it seems likely that Schocken paid him for his
advice.

Eventually, the lack of funding
at Pantheon not only prevented expansion at the Wolffs’ expense, but also made
“the carrying on of Pantheon’s operation a problem”[36] once
the economic boom of the war and postwar years ended and times became dire.
From 1947/48, inflation raised production costs, yet consumers were unwilling
to pay higher prices for books. At the same time, shipping costs increased and
gross sales decreased. The auditor’s reports for the years 1949 to 1951
presented a dark picture: Only five to ten titles were published every season;
these were usually printed in copy runs of only 1,000 to 5,000; of these, often
far fewer than one thousand copies, with a maximum of up to 2,000 copies, were
sold. Kurt Wolff estimated that, out of fifty titles in those three years,
eleven fared “disastrous,” thirteen “bad,” eight “fair,” and only twelve “good.”[37]
Kurt’s noblesse and grandeur in coping with these mortifying difficulties, at
what could well have been the end of his second life as a publisher, renewed
the respect that Helen had gained for her husband’s integrity and countenance
during their emigration years. Business failure was a somewhat melancholic
prospect but not an existential concern: “I remember Kurt’s coming into the
bedroom one day—I can still see him, standing there in the doorway, looking elegant
and elegiac—and saying, ‘Helen, do you realize how close we are to
bankruptcy?’”[38]

At one point, Schabert, who considered
Pantheon’s future also to be his, mortgaged his own securities and gave
Pantheon a personal loan of $15,000, bridging the working capital deficiency in
the short term.[39]
Helen used the little money available for publicity and promotion efficiently. She
established excellent contacts with the most prominent reviewers and then placed
ads with quotes from their reviews on pages of newspapers and magazines
frequently turned to by ardent readers and book lovers. She also handled the
religious and juvenile department, which published the only profitable books in
those years. That Pantheon survived, however, was not due to any of these
factors, but to the fact that it almost continuously generated profits from
“other income”—from the Bollingen Series
and from the Book-of-the-Month Club choices.

While the income from Bollingen was continuous and reliable,
the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC) selections came as a windfall, but a windfall
that hit Pantheon almost every year. The BOMC had been founded in 1923 by Harry
Scherman, at that time owner of an advertising agency, who had recognized the
potential of marketing critically acclaimed books by mail. A jury of renowned
critics selected the books in a procedure that could be modified when a book
was considered highly important or popular. In the 1940s, the membership of the
club rose to almost 900,000 members.[40] The
Wolffs befriended Scherman and his family and received a lot of help from them,
just as they maintained excellent relationships with the board members and
editors of the Bollingen Foundation. All these people supported Pantheon’s
publishing policy as much as they could. Paradoxically, more than anything else
it was the Wolffs’ acommercial attitude and the reputation of uncompromising
quality that saved Pantheon during the lean years.

The entrepreneurial and
economic success that finally came in 1955 was again a direct consequence of that
attitude and reputation. After long
years of silence, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of Charles Lindbergh, had written
the small book A Gift from the Sea, a
semi-poetic and semi-philosophical counseling book on how to preserve one’s
inner life under the strain of everyday demands. She herself lived under
immense strains, subjected to a husband who was an iconic figure in the
American public but tough to the point of sadism to his wife and children,
traumatized by the kidnapping and murder of her first child followed by
relentless persecution by the tabloids, and at a complete loss to understand
that her writing could be seen as apologetic to her husband’s past as a
supporter of Nazi Germany. Now presenting her book to the public filled her
with the utmost apprehension. She had met Kurt Wolff in 1949 at the Aspen
bicentennial celebrations of Goethe and since then become deeply attached to
his “European,” gentle, cultured and generous manners and to the Wolffs’
tactful way of not asking uncomfortable questions. The Wolffs liked her and
even liked Charles, too. And again, it is difficult to distinguish between
their intrinsic judgment, based on their values, and the historical
circumstance that the Lindberghs were by all means well respected and promised
success in the American mainstream culture of the time. The Wolffs showed
leniency not only toward the Lindberghs’ pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish entanglements
of the past, but also to those of CG Jung, Konrad Lorenz and other authors.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh became one of their closest friends. They never mentioned
that the literary quality of her writing actually did not meet their standards,
and instead praised her uncalculating endeavor to face her fame and difficult
life with what they considered “GALLANTRY, GRACIOUSNESS, and, above all, MORAL
BEAUTY.”[41] The
conditions for Pantheon to publish her book were arranged by her husband: a
straight 15% royalty for the trade book, 75% for all secondary rights and a
refusal to play a role in any kind of publicity—conditions quite unheard of in
conventional publishing.[42] The
book sold more than 600,000 copies and was a turning point for Pantheon, not
only financially, but also because it showed that it was an American publishing
house, good for American authors and American readers. In the days before the publication
Kurt Wolff wrote a long and grateful letter to Anne Morrow Lindberg:

I am thinking of you and of your gift to us with an
undivided heart, weighing it and what it has meant to me, Kurt Wolff, with more
than gratitude – with a sense of the miraculous. I had long since resigned
myself to do my work in this country under the sign of Péguy – that is, in
relative obscurity, one’s efforts disproportionate to their tangible results,
braced and exhausted simultaneously by swimming against the stream. Whenever
books were offered us by authors, agents, foreign publishers, they were
inevitably the ‚difficult’ ones, the ones promising success going to the
old-established, large American firms. (...). It seemed a fateful, if irrevocable
pattern. And that is why, in thinking of your gesture in giving us the Gift
from the Sea, I used the term ‚miraculous.’ It was just that to me: the free,
trusting, generous gift of an uncalculating heart.[43]

The Wolffs finally seemed to
have managed squaring the circle, being commercially successful while being
acommercial or even anti-commercial at the same time. Three years later they
were again offered a miraculous gift on the basis of their reputation: Doctor Zhivago, by the Russian writer
Boris Pasternak. This epic account of the Russian Revolution, written in communist
Russia, had been smuggled into the West through different channels, and its
publication had to be undertaken with the utmost caution and care so as to not
additionally endanger Pasternak. For many years the Wolffs had cultivated
excellent contacts to European publishing houses working under similar
principles as Pantheon, especially to British firms with whom they could share
translation or even production costs. In January 1957, Marjorie Villiers of The Harvill Press introduced them to the
young Italian communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who had been given
the manuscript and the world rights by Pasternak. Villiers referred explicitly to the Wolffs’
experience as emigrants.[44] The
strategy to protect Pasternak was to downplay the political significance of his
novel and to emphasize its literary significance in the Russian tradition. Kurt
Wolff considered the book as the pinnacle of his career, comparing it to
Kafka’s books and convinced that it was “one of the greatest if not the
greatest work of fiction published in any language in our generation.”[45] In
his own house, though, he had a difficult time making the publication happen,
as Kyrill Schabert argued that there was no receptiveness for Russian novels
among American readers. Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958,
as Kurt Wolff had foreseen, and the book sold more than a million copies in the
United States within a few weeks.

The overwhelming success of Doctor Zhivago made it feasible that
Pantheon would establish itself as a player in the major league of American
quality trade publishing, next to Random House, Knopf, and others. But the
breakthrough also meant that the seed of destruction, which lay in Pantheon’s
ownership structure, came to bear fruit. Perhaps this could have still been
avoided had it not been for a change in the U.S. book market affecting all
publishing houses. This change was a result of the demographic growth and the
expansion of higher education in the postwar years.[46]
Toward the end of the Fifties, the book industry shifted from the periphery to
the center of financial interest. “Wall Street men,” “Wall Street money,” and
“Wall Street ideas” became involved in the book market. An article in the
magazine Saturday Review in October
1960, titled “The Gold Rush on Publishers’ Row,”[47]
attributed this new interest to the baby boom generation growing up: “It all
started (...) when some guy down here [on Wall Street] realized that the baby
boom was going to mean more than gigantic sales of diapers and baby food. Now
all of a sudden everyone thinks that textbooks are a foolproof growth
situation. And they’re right; you just can’t miss with all those kids to
educate.”[48]
An interest that appeared to affect only the textbook departments also took its
toll on trade books, especially quality trade book publishing. Quality trade
books had to build the corporate image that was desirable in order to sell the
textbooks, and in order to heighten the trade books’ marketability, their
operations would have to be professionalized and modernized. The author of the
article stated that this had already resulted in “a split personality” of
publishing: While for textbooks “quality makes money,” for trade books
“marketability makes money,”[49]
which in the end might lead to general mediocrity and to the end of independent
editors’ decisions.

The growing interest in capital
in publishing and the subsequent changes in the nature of this business
conveyed the impression that the future would lie with someone like Kyrill Schabert
rather than with the old-fashioned Wolffs, who ran their operations in an
unorganized way and could be misunderstood as oblivious to economic realities
and commercial prospects. In those years, the board of Pantheon was dominated
by two men whose main asset was that they could help get Pantheon out of its
European niche and make it more compatible with the American market: John M.
Lewis, lawyer and partner of the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, and Nathan
W. Levin, an investment consultant and financial aid to a number of
philanthropic and cultural institutions.[50]
Levin represented a large group of stockholders—those who had bought the shares
that Pantheon had given out since 1944. Lewis, Levin, and Schabert took turns
filling the positions of chairman and secretary of the company. As early as
1955, Levin argued with Kurt Wolff, denying him the role of “publisher” and
demoting him to “editor.” Why he did this is not clear, but Kurt Wolff
vehemently claimed ever after that to be Pantheon’s “publisher” he did not need
the majority of the capital or the title of president or chairman; rather, the
“publisher” should be “the man who shapes a firm’s editorial policy and directs
the editors—in a small firm publisher and editor may well be one and the same
person.”[51] This
semantic debate, which only thinly veiled a power struggle, became more intense
over the years. By the end of 1958, Schabert, Lewis, and Levin were determined
in their “efforts to reconstruct”[52]
Pantheon as the market seemed to demand: to reorganize, rearrange,
professionalize it, and get an economically sound grip not only on
distribution, sales, and inventory control, but also on its editorial
operations.

For many years, the Wolffs were
willing to keep Kyrill Schabert on the team, maintaining that “Kyrill kept up
contact, and very ably, with people in the book trade and with various
publishing organizations and committees in the U.S.,” leaving “the hard core of
publishing” to the Wolffs.[53] Kurt
talked “with gallows humor, of K’s ‘playing the publisher’” even to Curt von
Faber du Faur, his old friend and Kyrill’s stepfather: “My dear, what should I
have done? There was just one way out in all these years: tell the Pantheon directors—HIM
or ME. I couldn’t. If only for your sake.”[54]
Instead, they desperately tried to sustain the friendship that they had
fostered from the beginning and to involve him wherever they saw fit. They
would have continued to live quietly with the inherent conflict if, at some
point, Schabert’s position had not infringed on their reputation—not only as
publishers, but also as the editors who had the literary standing to attract
and keep authors. There were rumors, apparently spread by Schabert himself,
that he, not the Wolffs, had won Anne Morrow Lindbergh for Pantheon, and in
1958 newspaper articles appeared that pronounced Schabert as publisher of
Pasternak and Mary Renault. That was the final straw. On November 27, 1958,
Kurt wrote a devastating letter to Kyrill, crushing him morally and debunking
not only his literary but also his economic judgments: “You are not a publisher
and you never will be. You are an illiterate in literature, you cannot
differentiate between a good book and a bad book, not even between a marketable
and an unmarketable one. (...) I am not in need of publicity, but I refuse, at
my age, to be ridiculed by your conceitedness and your craving for
recognition.”[55]

This was the breach, although
it took another half year until the Wolffs resigned. The Wolffs and Schabert
interpreted it all in terms of personal jealousies, character flaws,
selfishness, and intellectual or moral inferiority. Human mistakes and
self-deceptions had brought a difficult, but manageable situation to an end.
But one could also argue the other way: A transpersonal constellation, created
by the ownership structure and aggravated by the commercializing of the market,
had turned everybody involved into victims and human weakness into a relevant
factor.

In his response to Wolff’s
letter, Schabert raised one legitimate and important point: “Your complete
disinclination to discuss with me the future of Pantheon, and what should be
done in the event of your retirement,” a disinclination he found “incredibly
selfish and thoughtless vis-à-vis those who have a stake, directly or
indirectly, in Pantheon.”[56] Kurt
Wolff had turned seventy in 1957, and his old age did ask for a transition at
Pantheon, though not for a “reconstruction” as meant by the board. He still was
amazingly lively and energetic, and his enthusiasm for books, authors, and
communication in general was undaunted. But his efficiency depended completely
on his symbiotic cooperation with Helen, who compensated for his weaknesses.
She had the language skills to do the editing; she wrote in his name the
letters that required nuances; she fostered the relationships with many of the
authors and all of the translators, reviewers, and publicity and production
people; she compensated for his growing deafness, his forgetfulness when he was
tired and his absences while ill. In 1948, Kurt Wolff developed a serious
condition, which abated but came back full blow when his heart failed in early
1958 and made it necessary to keep him away from stress.

The faint hope that their son
Christian would succeed him dwindled when, at an early age, Christian devoted
himself to music as a disciple of John Cage and later chose a career in
academics. Immediately after the war there had been plans to have Maria, Kurt
Wolff’s daughter from his first marriage, move to New York with the prospect of
working at Pantheon. But Maria, a talented and book-loving young woman who had
lived through National Socialism and the war in Germany, did not have the
strength to emigrate. Her brother Nikolaus joined the Wolffs in 1948, but chose
to study chemistry and become a research manager in electrophotography. There
was also the son of Jacques Schiffrin, André Schiffrin, to be considered as
part of the Pantheon family. He, however, was not asked to join the staff until
the Wolffs had left.[57]

The natural successor to Kurt
Wolff was of course Helen Wolff herself. In 1958, at the age of 52, she felt at
the peak of her power, doing several jobs at once. Understaffed and
underfinanced as Pantheon had been until the Pasternak miracle, the firm would
not have been able to carry on without her. Kurt never failed to point out
Helen’s contribution and vital importance.

Nevertheless, for years it went
without saying that she would retire together with Kurt, in spite of her younger
age and devotion to work. In a private letter in 1952 she even contemplated
returning to Germany upon becoming a widow to take a teaching job at the
boarding school she had attended as a girl.[58] The
Wolffs’ traditional understanding of gender roles made it impossible to discuss
Helen’s position, and when the conflict between Kurt Wolff and Schabert erupted
she refused “to be mentioned in this controversy.”[59] The
contradiction between her real importance and the fact that it was nowhere
acknowledged put a heavy burden on the question of succession at Pantheon. To
the outside world it seemed logical that the president, Schabert, would succeed
Kurt Wolff. Helen either would or would not continue under his leadership—something
that was unthinkable for the Wolffs and for those who knew about the division
of labor at Pantheon. The true adversaries in the conflict were not Kurt Wolff
and Schabert, but Helen Wolff and Schabert, and Schabert was thoroughly afraid
of Helen, who was prone to temperamental attacks.[60]

Making Kurt Wolff’s age and the
question of succession a taboo subject had other dire consequences. Since the
Wolffs remained faithful to their principle that they would not fight over
money, the years passed without a word about how they would finance their
retirement. Only in 1958, when Kurt became ill and was unable to work for
weeks, a Pantheon pension trust was installed—too late to secure the Wolffs so
much as a carefree evening in expensive Manhattan. At the end of 1958, they
decided to move to Switzerland to a place in the countryside. Officially, they moved
to open a European branch for Pantheon to facilitate and strengthen contact
with European authors and publishers. Unofficially, the move was necessary for
Kurt’s health, to get him away from the poisoned atmosphere of the New York
office and to allow them a cheaper life. The board of directors made the Wolffs
pay for their retreat by reducing their salaries to one half of what Schabert
received. They also made them step down from the board, alleging this was necessary—a
pretext, as the Wolffs later found out.[61] The
Wolffs had to sell all their shares of Pantheon to be able to finance living in
Switzerland. With no financial stakes in Pantheon anymore, their role as
entrepreneurs had come to an end.

In Switzerland, Kurt recovered,
and the Wolffs were able to enlist several new authors and books, among them The Tin Drum by Günter Grass and The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa.
After all, they did not have the slightest intention of retiring, and the
geographical separation from the Pantheon office in New York clarified several
things. Firstly, the perfect symbiosis of Kurt and Helen, who (together with
Jacques Schiffrin) had achieved everything Pantheon stood for, could be
continued not only until but even beyond death. It became obvious that Helen
was capable of doing all the work “in Kurt’s name” and “for Kurt” once he was
gone. Secondly, the Wolffs did not need Pantheon to be successful publishers
and could do better without it, forming new alliances that spared them the
downsides of entrepreneurship. And thirdly, Pantheon, stripped of the Wolffs,
would not be able to survive as an independent company. Even though several new
editors were employed, the office drifted into chaos.

While Schabert was desperately
trying to attain control over information and work flows and became involved in
yet another power struggle with the new managing editor Gerald Gross,
manuscripts were neglected, queries of authors were left unanswered, books
ready for publication were reopened and meddled with, and cooperation with the
Wolffs in Switzerland was made as inefficient and strained as possible.[62] The
frustrated authors complained and turned directly to Helen, who had trouble
explaining the situation to them: “I am afraid what has happened is that the
place got ‚organized’. We have been running it in a frightfully individualistic,
haphazard fashion, not at all the normal American way. (...) I was brought up
by an unsophisticated mother with the motto: ‘There’s only one way to get
things done—and that’s to do them.’ No IBM machines necessary for that.”[63] In
order to get things done, Helen corresponded informally with the copy editor
James Holsaert, who—while still working at the New York office—openly declared
his loyalty to the Wolffs and moved the correspondence to his home address to
avoid the “master file” that Schabert had introduced. In April 1960, on the
occasion of another botched book and an insulting letter from Gerald Gross, the
Wolffs gave the New York office an ultimatum for an apology.[64] When
this was dismissed, the Wolffs were ready to resign. On May 24 they wrote a
letter to Nathan Levin, the chairman of the board, listing their demands and
requirements to continue working for Pantheon: As the publication list for the
next three years was again exclusively their work alone, in spite of the
substantial increase in staff in the New York office, they would not stand
further discrimination in payments. They wanted it to be acknowledged that all
major Pantheon authors desired to work with them personally, not with the New
York staff. And they demanded to be reinstated as directors on the board, which
had been withholding all information from them for more than a year and had
excluded them under false pretenses in the first place.[65] The
president and the directors were not in a hurry to respond to this ultimatum.
Schabert declared in a note to the chairman that he would not forget the Wolffs’
personal attacks against him. It was “regrettably true” that most authors liked
to work only with the Wolffs, and that Pantheon’s list for the next three years
was again the work of the Wolffs. “But what of the future? Pantheon has made
its special niche in American publishing. Its future rests on this side of the
ocean. And while we must maintain a strong lifeline with the European sources
which the Wolffs have ably cultivated, it is essential both to the health and
the long future of the firm that its imprint be increasingly associated with
the best of American publishing output.”[66]

It was not until July 6, 1960,
that a directors’ meeting took place in which all the Wolffs’ stipulations were
rejected. The minutes record that the “directors reviewed the history of
negotiations with Mr. and Mrs. Kurt Wolff culminating in the employment
contracts with them and the contract for the purchase of their stock interests
in the company.” Even though nobody saw reasons to contradict their claims, “it
was the unanimous feeling of the Board that the request of Mr. and Mrs. Wolff
could not be reconciled with the basic problems which the above-mentioned
contracts attempted to resolve; that Mr. and Mrs. Wolff’s demands had been
fully complied within every respect in the spring of 1959. Accordingly, the
Board unanimously agreed that it would be unwise to make any changes in the
existing arrangement.”[67] Schabert’s
salary, by contrast, was raised again as a “tangible recognition (...) to the
invaluable services rendered” by him, and Schabert and Gross were given bonuses
almost twice as high as those of the Wolffs. As Helen wrote to Holsaert: “In
order to come to such a decision, Kurt’s and my character must have been in for
a thorough assassination, our poor bones naked and covering the floor. Nothing
of this was quoted in the Minutes, but anyone could read that between the
lines.”[68]

On July 23, 1960, the Wolffs
offered their resignation effective September 30. On August 4, the chairman
accepted. Almost immediately the race was on as to how to publicly explain the
resignation, which came as a shock to many authors and to the publishing world.
The Wolffs could not prevent the dissemination of the most logical version:
that Kurt, having grown old and ill, had confidently placed Pantheon in
Schabert’s hands. But most of their authors understood the situation and hinted
that they would be loyal to them. Kurt and Helen quietly waited for offers from
other publishing houses. It was a moment of great suspense. When the news of
their resignation had spread, several houses approached them.[69]
Negotiations with Doubleday, which had a prominent Catholic list, were already
advanced when the young and powerful president of Harcourt, Brace, William
Jovanovich, overwhelmed them with an entrepreneurial determination and
generosity that they had always missed at Pantheon. His simple inquiry “Do you
want to publish with me?” containing the essential word “publish,” was read by
them as an acknowledgement that to have the responsibilities and the standing
of a publisher, one does not need to own the place, and that they were welcome
to shape their own publishing policy on the basis of mutual trust and respect.[70] Kurt
Wolff and Jovanovich outdid each other in light-handed generosity negotiating
the contract. But the real question for Jovanovich during these
negotiations—though discreetly pursued—was the efficiency, the wide-ranging
ability, and the linguistic expertise of Helen Wolff. Their books were to be
published under the imprint “A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book” and the order of
their names indicated what the contract guaranteed in two inconspicuous words:
that it applied to “both or either,” i.e. that Helen could continue by herself.
The imprint at Harcourt survived Kurt Wolff’s death in 1963 and blossomed for
more than three decades, bringing postwar European literature to the United States
and continuously generating not exuberant but reasonable profits for the
company. Helen died in 1994, and her books, which were taken over by her
successor Drenka Willen, form an important part of Harcourt’s successful
backlist to this day. How Harcourt itself stumbled into the minefield of
excessive commercialization and was eventually robbed of its identity in the
merger with Houghton Mifflin is another story.

Pantheon Books’ independence
came to an end in 1961. Kurt Wolff had foreseen that the firm could not survive
independently, even if personal conflicts were left aside. In a detailed, five-page
memo to Schabert dated “Summer, 1958,” before the breach, he explained why his
“view of Pantheon’s future after Helen’s and [his] retirement [was] altogether
not too optimistic:” The firm would face “a terrific increase of the payroll,” having
to employ at least six experienced people that could fill the vacancies created
by their departure. Moreover, Pantheon had always been dependent on “other
income” from Bollingen and the subsidiary rights. The excellent books that had
given the firm its reputation had not achieved the sales one could expect from
them: “I believe that these titles would have got a distribution twice as great
and more with other publishers and that would make the difference between loss
and profit.” Kurt did not mention that the sales were Schabert’s
responsibility. He alluded to the small size and the undercapitalization of
Pantheon, which made its operations unsafe, and concluded with advice to end
Pantheon’s independent existence: “Try a merger of some kind with a larger,
well-founded firm, disposing of an experienced staff whose general line has
enough in common with Pantheon to make the combination look reasonable and
natural.” Wolff suggested Farrar, Strauss & Cudahy.[71] On
June 9, 1961, Pantheon was sold to Random House, which had already bought
Alfred A. Knopf.[72]
The new owners, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, dismissed Schabert, let Gerald
Gross go to Macmillan, and established André Schiffrin as the new executive
editor. He led Pantheon for almost thirty years as a quality imprint, modernizing
its program by introducing the socially and politically engaged literature that
the Wolffs had always spurned, and by eventually selling the Catholic and more
conservative titles of the list back to Helen. While André Schiffrin and Helen
Wolff differed in their tastes and understandings, one could see their lists as
complementary, and they maintained good relations into the late eighties and
early nineties, when they both fought against the new economic forces that
endangered their imprints’ integrity.[73]

Helen and Kurt Wolff always
emphasized that they considered themselves of European rather than of German
origin, a choice that dated back to the years before their arrival in New York.
Their decision to leave Germany, temporarily in 1930 and for good in 1933, was
the consequence of an alienation from “the Germans” as an imagined national
community. Neither socialist or communist beliefs nor a nationalist or
patriotic conviction allowed them to differentiate conceptually between “the
Germans” and those people who had brought Hitler to power. To return to Germany
after all that had happened, like Brecht or Zuckmayer or their fellow publishers
Gottfried Bermann Fischer and Wieland Herzfelde, was never an option for the
Wolffs. In the thirties, they would have opted to be French and taken on French
citizenship if France had accepted them. After their arrival in the U.S., they
opted to be Americans. They were infinitely grateful not only to be safe, but
also to be allowed to move around freely, to work for their living, and to act
in their field of interest. Once Pantheon was founded, they happily adopted the
“American ideal,” which Helen cited in her first postwar letter to her sister
in Germany: “‘The soul of republican America is the opportunity and
encouragement given to each to build up, by his own efforts, and for himself
and his dependants, some measure of dominion and independence all his own
(...).’ We have experienced this ideal to be true and sincere firsthand and
physically for us and for many other people who were not restricted and
harassed even in times of war.”[74] Kurt
received American citizenship in early 1947, Helen already in the summer of
1946. Identification with the United States was spurred tremendously by the
fact that in those years the country was at the climax of its wealth and power:

It is a very strange feeling to have again a status
in the world, to belong somewhere, and to enjoy protection, after having been
an exile and an alien for so long. If one lives long enough, the wheel has time
to turn, and fortune and misfortune to show their reverse. It seems like only
yesterday that we lived in France in fear of our lives, and completely at the
mercy of our hosts. And now to be the citizen of what the oath-taking judge
called ‘the mightiest nation of the earth’, with even an atom bomb or two to
back you up—I can’t quite get used to ‘So the last will be first.’ This great,
strange country, still so much in the making, has shown its best face on the
day I was sworn in.[75]

Prior to setting up Pantheon,
the Wolffs had not been as enthusiastic about the United States. In the first
months, while they were struggling for survival, when nobody seemed interested
in them just having witnessed the fall of Europe, they often felt depressed and
degraded to “manufactured goods of nature,” surrounded by a scared society of
egoists, and only their Christian belief reminded them “that we exist to love,
and not to hate:” “were we only philosophical and not also Christian, there
would be nothing better to do than drink the cup of hemlock and really
emigrate, this time to another star.” In another prewar letter, Helen wrote to
her sister in Germany that the Americans seemed “barbaric, with no talent for
the carefree enjoyment of life or gentle moral law”[76]—actually
not so unlike the barbaric and dynamic Germans whom they had fled in the first
place.[77]
Christianity for Helen in these surroundings served not only as an antidote
against hatred and fear, but also constituted the core of their identity, the
quintessence of what they had experienced and morally achieved before coming to
the United States: the lifestyle, the upbringing, the savoir vivre they had
learned from the “Latins” in France and Italy “which comprised not only empty
form, but consideration for one’s fellow human beings. I exercise this
form meticulously and also teach [our son] Christian to exercise it.”[78]

The dualism of barbaric and raw
(Germanic) America versus civilized and cultured (Latin) Europe conceptualized
by Helen in these letters could easily have led to futility, resignation, and
despair. The Wolffs, however, found that there was a way to reconcile these
opposites, and to integrate what they had brought along with what they had come
upon. There was a market for their “European” experiences, if only they managed
to distill what could be seen as valid and as communicable at the same time.
Therefore they “learned” America: “one has to learn this country like a new
language, it doesn’t come naturally like a dream come true, like my oh so
beloved France. There are no affinities to bridge the differences, everything
has to be done by experience and intellect.”[79] Consciously
and constantly assessing and calculating the cultural possibilities of the
American reader, the Wolffs found it was possible to sell him the cultural
assets that he himself felt wanting. If done ingeniously and subtly, one could
create a market from the cultural conditions which at first seemed so discouraging:
“One can get along well with the Americans if one doesn’t ask them to be like
us. They are culturally giant children, but simple, grateful and modest, and
their craving for culture, no matter how much they still misunderstand that
word, is touching somehow.”[80] The
scheme to financially exploit a self-proclaimed cultural superiority loses its
offensive overtone against the backdrop of the dire conditions that forced the
Wolffs to market themselves. But it was also softened by the emotional need and
intellectual will to transmit their knowledge of the bloody and traumatic
course that history had taken in old Europe to an America that to them still
seemed innocent and young, and to thereby contribute something to the country
which had rescued them from death. That they were allowed to fruitfully combine
the necessary and the desirable, not having to “cheat” or to act counter to
their values, became the new core of their identity and eventually even relaxed
the fixity of their Christian beliefs and Latin savoir vivre.

The Wolffs’ strategy of
marketing “European” culture proved successful. Books sold well if they were
perceived as a proof of good taste and education, as a status symbol. “They
should have it on their coffee table,” Helen would say in her later years when
she wanted a difficult read to be a bestseller,[81] and
would not hesitate to deploy her own and Kurt’s personalities and biographies
to achieve this goal. But in spite of the growing success, having to market the
cultural difference and stage her European origins always put a strain on her
and made it difficult for her to feel at ease. After all, their experiences
under Pantheon’s president Schabert had taught her that the cultural difference
had very dangerous downsides. The Wolffs had even
partly shared the consensus among the board of directors that sooner or later
Pantheon would have to break free from its “European” origins and move into the
mainstream, into fully “American” quality publishing, to succeed in the future.
Schabert had appealed to this consensus when he confronted the board with his
refusal to comply with the Wolffs, while at the same time admitting that their
claims and statements for the past and for the present were correct. For the sake
of an imagined future, the argument had prevailed that Pantheon had to
assimilate and, if necessary, leave its founder and publisher, who was too old
to change his cultural identity, behind. The chauvinism of this concept, which
equated “American” and “future,” bound it to cultural assimilation and, taken
to its logical conclusion, revoked the Wolffs’ American citizenship, sickened
and threatened the Wolffs, and led to their seeing Schabert’s machinations and
ambitions as a “murder attempt”[82]
on Kurt’s life. To recover his health Kurt had to leave not only the New York
office but the United States altogether, as Helen wrote to one of their
authors: “I suspect, he just simply was homesick for Europe. He has never
adapted to American ways.”[83]
Almost twenty years of successful integration seemed to be swept away. Only
after Kurt had died in 1963 did Helen return to the U.S. Backed by the strong
and unequivocally supportive William Jovanovich, who himself cultivated a
strong identity as the son of a Serbian coal miner, she continued to fight for
her own concept of America, “cling[ing] to the belief that our experience was
due to ‘an Un-American activity’,”[84]
and to prove for more than thirty years that she could bridge the past and the
future, the “European” and the “American”—this time not as an entrepreneur, but
as a culturally and economically successful partner in another immigrant’s
enterprise.

[2]
In 1996 the Goethe-Institute established the annually awarded Helen and Kurt
Wolff Translators’ Prize for outstanding literary translations from German into
English published in the United States, providing $10,000 for the translator.
Since 2001, the Kurt Wolff Foundation in Leipzig annually awards small,
independent publishing houses in Germany with a main prize of €25,000 and a
promotion prize of €5,000, and has recently begun to publish the booklists of
independent publishing.

[3]
The “era of people like Kurt Wolff, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Barney Rosset,
George Braziller, and so many others,” a gilded and mystified age with blurred
beginnings and ends. See Dan Simon and Tom McCarthy, “Editorial Vision and the
Role of the Independent Publisher,” in A
History of the Book in America, vol. 5:“The Enduring Book. Print Culture in Postwar America,”ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, Michael Schudson (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 210-222, here 210.

[16]
Beth Luey, “The Organization of the Book Publishing Industry,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 5: “The Enduring Book. Print Culture in
Postwar America,” 29-54, here 29. See also Charles A. Madison, Book Publishing in America (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966), VII.

[17]
The secondary sources about the book publishing market up until the second half
of the 1950s agree on these characteristics, although there are fundamental
differences in their evaluations and interpretations. On the role of publishers
and the economic nature of the publishing industry, see, for example, Linda M.
Scott, “Markets and Audiences,” in A
History of the Book in America, vol. 5:“The Enduring Book. Print Culture in Postwar America,” 72-106, here 84-85.

[24]
Kurt Wolff to the literary agent Georges Borchardt, May 5, 1959, Private
Collection Georges Borchardt. Borchardt had offered and warmly recommended Elie
Wiesel’s La Nuit to them, which Kurt
Wolff did not want to publish because they had “always refrained from doing
books of this kind.”

[29]
This was considered “far below subsistence level,” and the salaries were
accordingly raised to $525 and $625 respectively at the Special Meeting of
Board of Directors, December 15, 1950, Helen and Kurt Wolff Papers, Box 50,
Folder 1554.

[30]
The Bollingen Series was established
in 1943 and first financed by Mellon’s Old Dominion Foundation, after 1945 by
the Bollingen Foundation. See William
McGuire, Bollingen. An Adventure in
Collecting the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press [Bollingen
Series] 1982, rev. ed. in paperback 1989). See also the letters between Mary
and Paul Mellon and Kurt Wolff, Helen and Kurt Wolff Papers, Box 29, Folder
869-870; and Kurt Wolff’s undated note “no answer, for the record only”
(December 1958), Helen and Kurt Wolff Papers, Box 34, Folder 1025.

[50]
See Obituary Nathan Levin, New York Times,
October 23, 1988,
(accessed May 5, 2011); John M. Lewis can be traced on the Internet as
cofounder of the Irma T. Hirschl Trust
(accessed May 5, 2011). The meetings of the board of directors of Pantheon
usually took place at the offices of Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

[61]
Employment agreements signed April 17, 1959, Private Collection André
Schiffrin; Kurt and Helen Wolff to Nathan Levin, May 24, 1960, Private Collection
André Schiffrin. Lewis, as the firm’s lawyer, had told the Wolffs that their
moving abroad made it legally impossible to stay on the board.

[62]
See the correspondence between the Wolffs and James Morris, Hannah Arendt, Karl
Jasper, John Becker, Gerry Gross, James Holsaert et. al., Helen and Kurt Wolff
Papers, and Family Archive Christian Wolff.

[70]
Mitgang, “Profiles. Helen Wolff,” The New
Yorker, August 2, 1982, 62. According to the article and other sources,
Jovanovich wrote his inquiry on a simple postcard in longhand, from his home in
Westchester.

[73]
See the manuscript of Helen Wolff’s talk at the Goethe House, New York, May 15,
1990, Helen and Kurt Wolff Papers, Box 73, Folder 2067.

[74]
Helen Wolff to Elisabeth Steinbeis, undated (April 1946), Family Archive
Elisabeth Steinbeis. The quote originated from an article by Peter S. Grosscup,
“How to save the corporation,” McClure’s Magazine, February 1905, as
republished by the Center for Economic and Social Justice
(accessed April 18, 2011).

Volume

Themes

Regions

This project is sponsored by the Transatlantic Program of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany through funds of the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.